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Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present

“The past is a foreign country,”
novelist L. P. Hartley wrote. “They do things differ­ently there.” He
penned that in 1953, but in the digital era the past is now present and
all around us: Millions of out-of-print books and historical videoclips,
black-and-white movies, nearly forgotten TV shows and pop songs are all
available with a credit card or in many cases for free. It used to be
that, for economic and techno­logical reasons, this cultural history was
locked away. Libraries and corporate archives kept a small subset of it
available, but the rest was in storage, out of reach. The reversal has
happened in just the past decade. We are now living in a history glut;
the Internet has muddled the line between past and present.